Wednesday, May 11, 2005

BBC: "Like sushi restaurant conveyor belts, RSS delivers content to people so they can easily pick what they want to read." 

Matt Deatherage: "Programmers from the early days like Dave are used to being told they can't do things, and then they sat down and did them anyway." 

Don Park: Conference-jacking. 

Dear Google. You're doing personalization now. Good idea. I'm signed in, and you've been recording my searches for the better part of a month now. Next, let me tell you where my weblog is. That should let you do even more personalization. Think of all the info you have about me because of that. (And by the way that goes a long way toward clueing in the people who want to put ads in RSS feeds. Maybe if I have a certain amount of flow you don't want to distract me with ads, just think how many hits I can deliver if I link to your story.) 

Infoworld: "Google is contemplating various improvements to its popular Blogger Web logging service, including native image uploading and deeper integration with the company's Gmail Web-mail service." 

Afternoon coffee notes: Tomorrow I'm giving a talk at an academic conference in Pisa, Italy; from the beach in Florida. We did a dry-run of the video conferencing tools on Monday, they work great. It's also been suggested that I do a podcast of the talk I would have done at the Syndicate conference next week, and I think that's exactly the right way to route around an outage, in this case the lack of trust of a conference promoter. There's still important business to be done among the leading users of RSS. So I've had two jarring experiences with conferences this month. Maybe it has something to do with turning 50. Trying to make lemonade best I can. And looking forward to tomorrow's talk. Ironically the politics of the coastal United States are closer to that of Italy than they are of the deep south. Go figure. BTW, in an email from Glenn Reynolds he says the aftermath of the Respectful Disagreement discussion is not political. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's only been listening to himself not the people he's been defending. If it's not political, Glenn I got a nice bridge you'd be interested in.  

Mark Glaser's report from BlogNashville. 

Pssst Charles, try IT Conversations. It's exactly what you're looking for.  

And Charles, here's some good advice. Pandering for links that way is un-cool. 

Geek News notes that we're talking more about Yahoo these days. 

Library Stuff reports on four new feeds from the US Copyright Office. 

backstage.bbc.co.uk is the BBC's new developer network. 

Thank you Instapundit 

Glenn Reynolds's Instapundit weblog is quite a flow machine. In the last few days since BlogNashville, he's been sending his readers over here, always with a scolding message. My behavior isn't up to his standards, I am too rude for him, so he's now telling everyone who reads his blog that I'm not a nice person.

Okay, I'll survive. I'm not your typical shirking liberal, scared of a few nasty words from the Limbaugh crowd. Only it's a surprise to see Reynolds defending their right to control the conversation, especially since he didn't have anything to say at the session on Saturday. It's like the citizen who doesn't vote yet has the gall to complain about the outcome.

Over the objections of those who Reynolds defends, the mission actually was accomplished, we came up with a great list of shared values -- imho that's what we should be discussing. Right and Left did get together on Saturday, between the slurs and attacks, we managed to draft a pretty good list. It's not ratified by anyone, but at least it's the beginning of an important discussion.

Instead Reynolds wants the focus on my personality. I don't know why, but I can imagine. It's his worst nightmare that his conservative colleagues would work with my liberal friends to help our country. That's right Glenn, it's our country, and don't you forget it. People from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles go to war and die for America when our country needs us. Patriotism isn't exclusive to conservatives or Christians. The strength of our country is its diversity, intelligence, ambition, idealism, resources and our love of country.

At the beginning of the conference we sang America The Beautiful. At the time I wasn't sure if that was the right song, but after the fact I feel it was the perfect song.

So to Glenn Reynolds, you pointed to me when I was sarcastic and angry. How about pointing to me now? Sure I don't agree with your focus, but I will fight to the death for your right to speak, for your dignity as an American, for your right to disagree with me. Let's get back on the road to success in America. And to do that, we need everyone's help.